Annie Get Your Gun (Original Broadway Cast 1946) / (Original Film 1950)

Annie Get Your Gun began, like many of the greatest musicals, with a series of unexpected events - some happy, some not.

Dorothy Fields was a woman at loose ends early in 1945. Her latest show, Up In Central Park, had opened on 27 January, and although the book she wrote with her brother Herbert and her own lyrics had both been warmly received, she felt restless.

Her good buddy Ethel Merman was depressed after the recent closing of her first flop, Sadie Thompson, and wanted Fields to write a new show for her. Dorothy was willing, but couldn't come up with a single idea.

One night, she was wandering around Broadway with Herbert when they passed by one of those shooting galleries where the sharpeyed and steady-handed can win stuffed animals by the score. A young GI on leave was doing just that and his lady love was positively weighed down with a plush menagerie.

'That might make a cute story,' suggested Herbert.

'Why does it always have to be the man who's the marksman?' bristled Dorothy. 'Haven't they ever heard of Annie Oakley?'

She stopped dead in her tracks.

'Oh my God! Annie Oakley. The Merm.'

That's all she had to say. It had only been fifteen years since Merman made her Broadway debut in Girl Crazy, but she was already an icon, with hits like "Anything Goes" and "DuBarry Was A Lady" to her credit.

Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley: it was an idea that everyone adored. Merman was the first to sign on. Then Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to produce. Jerome Kern offered to write the score and Joshua Logan was set to direct.

There actually was an Annie Oakley, by the way. She was a farm girl from Iowa and her real name was Annie Moses but she adopted 'Oakley' as her stage name. She fell in love with her rival (who really was named Frank Butler) and they toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show from 1880 to 1901.

Annie Oakley, as the team originally called their show,was set to go into rehearsal early in 1946.

Then, on 4 November 1945,Kern suffered a stroke, dying a week later.

The interesting thing is how no one thought of abandoning the show; they all felt the initial concept was that solid.

Rodgers and Hammerstein decided to start their search for a replacement at the top - with Irving Berlin, a man who had been riding high since he wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.